Spear of Light

The Glittering Edge, Book Two

Brenda Cooper

Spear of Light is the second book in The Glittering Edge duology. And it has been my introduction to Brenda Cooper’s science-fiction writing.

For the most part, I am impressed. While I missed Edge of Dark, the duology’s first book, I am pleased at how smoothly I was drawn into Spear of Light, a complex but engrossing tale of humans, post-humans, and robots on the “re-wilded” planet, Nym. This second book in the duology stands nicely on its own.

The general flow of the novel is summarized on other sites, such as Amazon and Pyr, so I won’t rehash it here. But a lone ranger, Charlie Windar, wants desperately to save his rebuilt planet and is caught in the middle of an approaching war between the post-humans (the Next) and the Shining Revolution, a group of humans who want to attack the Next, no matter if it means Nym will be wrecked (again) in the process.

Meanwhile, the Next, who previously were banished from Nym’s solar system and later returned in force, are now quickly building a massive new city on Nym. And the humans caught between the Next and the Shining Revolution cannot figure out why the Next seem driven, this time, to uncover something mysterious within Nym’s ancient history.

The White House and the University of the District of Columbia are two of the sites helping spotlight the National Week of Making, June 17-23, 2016.

“America has always been a nation of tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” a White House news release recently stated.

“Empowering students and adults to create, innovate, tinker, and make their ideas and solutions into reality is at the heart of the Maker Movement.”

Step Away from that SmartPhone and Make Something!

Do you worry that your children or grandchildren now spend too much time messing with cellphones and game players and no time learning basic life skills such as how to work with tools to create or repair things?

Do you worry that you have become a slave to time-wasting digital distractions and have lost touch with how to make stuff, repair things or create something new from available materials?

It may be time to be come a maker, too, and an advocate for others who need to expand their horizons beyond the devices clutched tightly in their hands.

Some How-to-Make-Something Book Selections

In recognition of National Week of Making and the third annual White House Maker Faire, here are some books from Maker Media that can help you and others get into (or back into) the art, science and fun of making things and learning useful skills.

Start Making!

A Guide to Engaging Young People in Maker Activities

Danielle Martin and Alisha Panjwani

Making is “the process of creating projects based on your ideas and interest,” the authors emphasize. “This Start Making! guide offers a series of creative do-it-yourself (DIY) projects that introduce young people to the basics of circuitry, coding, crafting, and engineering.”

Start Making! describes “a series of activity sessions that you can adapt to your situation” as an organizer and/or leader of activities for children and teens. “You can offer your own version of Start Making! activities in your home, at the library, at an after-school club, at the local community center, or anywhere else young people can gather to work on projects together.”

Tinkering

Kids Learn by Making Stuff, 2nd Edition

Curt Gabrielson

Giving kids the time, opportunity and motivation to tinker with things (and make things from other things) can have big educational payoffs, the author, a science teacher, contends.

To the question “Are kids learning anything while they are having fun?”, he gives an enthusiastic and lengthy reply: “[H]eck yes they’re learning something, and it may be the most valuable thing they’ve learned all week, and it may raise all sorts of questions in their minds that inspire them to learn more about what they’re tinkering with, and it may start them on a path to a satisfying career, not to mention good fun on their own time, and it may put them in the driver’s seat of their own education by realizing their competence and ability to learn through tinkering, and they may begin to demand more of just this sort of learning opportunity.” Whew!

By the way, don’t just hand this book to a kid and say “Go have fun!” It is mainly written for adults who are willing to help children learn the joys of using their hands and minds to make stuff and try simple experiments.

Getting Started with 3D Printing

A Hands-on Guide to the Hardware, Software, and Services Behind the New
Manufacturing Revolution

Liza Wallach Kloski, Nick Kloski, and HoneyPoint3D™

In a consumer-grade 3D printer, “thin strand of melted plastic is laid down, layer by layer, on a flat surface where it cools and hardens into an object,” the authors explain.

This book will not turn you into a manufacturing expert, but it does introduce major aspects of 3D printing and shows how to get started with computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D printing. It also introduces new makers to the two main types of consumer 3D printers: FDM, which use filament for fused deposition modeling, and SLA, which use resin for stereolithography.

Likewise, you learn the benefits of outsourcing your printing to firms with bigger, more expensive machines than a typical home user can afford. Meanwhile, consumer-focused 3D printing service bureaus offer another, less expensive choice. And you can have printing done by a local “hub” source, which may be one person offering to run your project on his or her 3D printer. In any case, you focus on creating a good design and uploading your files, and then your creation gets printed and shipped to you—or you go pick it up.

The book also covers topics such as what supplies you will need, how to get and use free 3D modeling software, how to correct mistakes in your models and prints, and how to lay out a 3D printing workspace.

Getting Started with Processing.py

Making Interactive Graphics with Python’s Processing Mode

Allison Parrish, Ben Fry, Casey Reas

“Processing.py,” the authors explain, “is an interactive programming and graphics framework for the Python programming language.” This book shows how to create drawings, animations, and interactive images, even if you have never used Python or had any other programming experience.

Processing.py helps make coding more accessible to artists, educators, designers, and beginners. And the book can be used by children, teens, and adults.

Indeed, Getting Started with Processing.py is a good way to introduce a young person to computer programming, because the simple programs that are entered cause images to be created and objects to be moved. And the parameters of the images and objects often can be changed to create new effects.

Encyclopedia of Electronic Components

Charles Platt and Fredrik Jansson

This final volume in the Encyclopedia of Electronics Components series focuses on a wide range of sensor devices that detect or respond to such factors as light, sound, heat, location, presence, proximity, orientation, oscillation, force, load, human input, gas and liquid properties, and electricity. The text describes what the sensors do, how they work, and how they can be used.

The authors note that many sensor devices previously were very expensive but “are now as cheap as basic semiconductor components such as a voltage regulator or a logic chip, and they are easy to use in conjunction with microcomputers.”

Larry D. Sweazy

Seventh Street Books

As I have mentioned here before, I love mystery stories where the investigator is an ordinary citizen, not a well-trained police detective or a struggling private sleuth beaten down by drunkenness, personal demons, and too many bad cases.

The investigator in See Also Deception, the second novel in the Marjorie Trumaine series, is dealing with than her share of life challenges. She is trying pay bills and scratch out a hardscrabble existence on a farm in rural North Dakota. She also is a full-time caregiver for her husband, Hank, a once-vigorous farmer now paralyzed from the neck down following a hunting accident.

During the very lean months between crops, Marjorie works from home for publishers, as a freelance indexer of books. Her ability to categorize and organize facts and details not only helps her get assignments and pay household bills; it also helps her solve murders in the countryside and in the small town nearby.

Set in the mid-1960s, amid Cold War tensions, See Also Deception has Marjorie struggling with demands at home and struggling with her belief that her friend Calla Elmore, the local librarian, did not shoot herself in the head but was murdered. Local law enforcement officials don’t share Marjorie’s suspicions, of course. So it is up to her to solve the case and prove them wrong.

Larry D. Sweazy, author of this series, is a prize-winning fiction writer who has turned out numerous other books. For the most part, the writing in this novel is very good. But the stark rural setting offers perhaps too many opportunities for internal monologue, once you’ve noted — and re-noted — the jackrabbits scurrying across the unpaved roads and the dust clouds billowing behind Marjorie’s world-weary Studebaker.

On a few occasions, Sweazy also uncorks a sentence that is just a bit too folksy, such as: “I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away from my questions about Calla’s death any more than a June bug could stay away from the dusk-to-dawn light at the peak of the garage roof.”

Covers MongoDB version 3.0

Kyle Banker

Yes, this updated edition of MongoDB in Action is aimed at software developers. However, the book wisely does not ignore those of us who are more casual users of MongoDB.

Indeed, this is a fine how-to book for MongoDB newcomers and casual users, too, particularly if you are patient and willing to read through an introductory chapter focusing on “MongoDB’s history, design goals, and application use cases.”

Many people, of course, just want to jump straight into downloading the software, running it, and playing with it for a while before getting down to any serious stuff such as application use cases. So this book’s Appendix A is the place to go first, so you can get MongoDB onto your Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. Then, after MongoDB is installed, you can jump back to Chapter 2 to start learning how to use the JavaScript shell.

After that, things quickly start getting more “practical.” For example, Chapter 3 introduces “Writing programs using MongoDB.” Here, Ruby is employed to work with the MongoDB API. But the author notes: “MongoDB, Inc. provides officially supported, Apache-licensed MongoDB drivers for all of the most popular programming languages. The driver examples in the book use Ruby, but the principles we’ll illustrate are universal and easily transferable to other drivers. Throughout the book we’ll illustrate most commands with the JavaScript shell, but examples of using MongoDB from within an application will be in Ruby.”

I won’t try to sum up everything in this well-written, 13-chapter book. I have used older, 2.X versions of MongoDB in MEAN stack applications. And, separately, I have worked a bit with Ruby and MongoDB. But in each case, I haven’t needed to learn all that much about MongoDB itself, mainly just ensure that it is storing data that can be accessed in the right place and updated, saved or deleted as needed. So this book, written for 3.0.X (and earlier and later) MongoDB releases is an eye-opener for me and one that I will keep around for reference and more learning now that I have upgraded to 3.2.

The book’s author knows that readers with some MongoDB experience will not read the book straight through. Instead, they will tackle chapters in many different orders and will even skip some chapters. And this is okay. MongoDB in Action: Second Edition is a book many of us will be happy to have handy whenever we need to get a better grip on some new aspect of working with this very popular open-source document database.

One cautionary note: The author points out that “as of MongoDB v3.0, 32-bit binaries will no longer be supported.” Of course, some 3.X 32-bit binaries are still out there, and you can install them. But you will get a lot of warning messages from MongoDB. So, download a 64-bit binary if your system will support it.

Rain Dogs

A Detective Sean Duffy Novel

Adrian McKinty

Now that I have suckered you into this review with a question, I’m going to give you something of a cop-out answer: Rain Dogs is the best Sean Duffy detective story I have read…since the last Sean Duffy detective story I read, which is Gun Street Girl. I have now read all five Sean Duffy mysteries, and I am a rock-solid fan of each one. Adrian McKinty is one hell of a good novelist, and his Sean Duffy series is first-rate police-procedural fiction.

Rain Dogs did unnerve me for the first few pages–it got off to a bit of a plodding, unexpected start. What? Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is helping protect Mohammed Ali from adoring crowds in Belfast?

And, it takes a while for the mystery Duffy must solve to come into focus. Yet, there is also plenty of introspection and unease on Sean Duffy’s part, and this keeps the reader engrossed and the story moving forward. Duffy has reached a point in his career when midlife crisis suddenly is in full-tilt boogie mode.

He has grown weary of the sameness in his job, weary of the Troubles that keep Protestants, Catholics, and paramilitaries in violent conflict, weary of constantly having to check under his car for mercury tilt switch bombs placed there by one side or the other or by criminals wanting him dead. Meanwhile, it keeps raining, raining, dreary raining. And Beth, the latest woman in his life, has broken off with him and moved out, taking most of what’s left of his heart with her.

Meanwhile, things keep going from really bad to really worse for Duffy, a suburban cop in the Carrickfergus branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). He suddenly finds himself investigating the second “locked room” violent death of his checkered career. This time, it looks a lot like a case of suicide. And there is high-level pressure to wrap up the case quickly and put it away. A big business project with many potential jobs for Northern Ireland is on the line.

But Duffy, even when depressed, drunk or beaten down, cannot let go of the suspicions and strong sense of justice that keep him moving forward.

As a detective and empathetic human being, he never stops pushing against the rising tides of bureaucracy, burnout and self-doubt.

“I stared down at the body again. There was something not quite right about this crime scene, something that I was missing, but try as I might I couldn’t figure out what it was. Had Beth’s departure frazzled me, or was it just thirteen long years of this exhausting profession in this exhausting land?”

Not even pressure and criticism from British government agencies can turn him aside once he has a theory and starts following it.

At one point, after chasing a lead into Finland and back, he is confronted by a shadowy representative of an unnamed British agency that is trying to get him to quit the case, in the name of fifteen hundred potential jobs for Belfast and Northern Ireland:

“You must be aware of your RUC record. A less-than-stellar police career, no real high-profile convictions. The fact that you never found out who killed Lizzie Fitzpatrick in that other so-called ‘locked room’ incident when you were with Special Branch. The fact that, for the last six years, you’ve been treading water here. A constant source of embarrassment to your superiors, a disappointment to your friends.”

To which Duffy retorts: “Maybe I’m not a great detective, maybe I ‘m not even a good detective, but I am fucking persistent….The UK government might not like it, the Irish government might not like it, but if I can make a case, the RUC will support me and the police down south will support me, too. Cops everywhere love nicking villains.”

Sean Duffy indeed is persistent. That is why he is able to solve cases that many other cops would not recognize, nor have the desire, energy and drive to pursue.

But, again, the strongest driver in Duffy’s life is his personal sense of justice. He will bend rules, strain budgets, knock heads, disobey orders, and sometimes even go around or straight through a few laws to get his hands–or his bullets–on a murderer.

Adrian McKinty fans and readers new to McKinty will find much to relish in Rain Dogs. Duffy is at his driven-down-but-rise-above-it best in this book. And some surprising changes occur in his life. If, with this book, you are new to the Sean Duffy series, get “the Troubles Trilogy” ASAP: The Cold, Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; and In the Morning I’ll Be Gone. Oh, and don’t miss the trilogy’s fine sequel, Gun Street Girl. One Sean Duffy tale, you may agree, is not enough.

Spring in Action

Craig Walls

If you have worked with the decade-old Spring framework, you know well that it has a long history of providing configuration headaches for developers. The new Spring Boot framework, on the other hand, literally brings much-needed simplification and automation to the process of using Spring. And it can put some refreshing fun back into application development.

“Spring Boot,” Craig Walls states in his new book, “is an exciting new way to develop Spring applications with minimal friction from the framework itself. Auto-configuration eliminates much of the boilerplate configuration that infests traditional Spring applications. Spring Boot starters enable you to specify build dependencies by what they offer rather than use explicit library names and version. The Spring Boot CLI takes Spring Boot’s frictionless development model to a whole new level by enabling quick and easy development with Groovy from the command line. And the [Spring Boot] Actuator lets you look inside your running application to see what and how Spring Boot has done.”

You do not need a lot of Spring experience to benefit from this book. You do need some Java background, and it is helpful to have used Groovy, Gradle and Maven a few times. But the book’s text is written smoothly, and it is well illustrated, with numerous code examples and a few screen shoots. So Java developers who are fairly new likely can use it and pick up new skills.

While going through the book, you develop a reading-list application using Spring Initializr, Spring Boot, Spring Tool Suite, and other tools. In the project, you “use Spring MVC to handle web requests, Thymeleaf to define web views, and Spring Data JPA to persist the reading selections to a database,” Craig Walls explains. Initially, at least, “an embedded H2 database” is employed during development.

Bottom line: with Spring Boot providing much of the heavy lifting, you likely will gain better feelings about the venerable Spring framework. You may even wind up with a healthy new respect for it. And Spring Boot certainly should add more years to Spring’s usefulness and viability in the marketplace.

Clojure in Action, 2nd Edition

Amit Rathore and Francis Avila

Clojure seems to be afflicted with a measles-like outbreak of parentheses, and it generally just looks strange to many software developers. And there’s a good reason for that, as this book’s two author point out in their recently released second edition.

“Clojure’s syntax is derived from its Lisp roots: lots of parentheses. It’s alien to most developers with experience in languages with Algol-inspired syntax like C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on.”

But Clojure also is an intriguing and powerful choice for many software development projects, Amit Rathore and Francis Avila insist. Clojure is “a functional Lisp on the JVM” (the Java Virtual Machine), and: “It is impossible to separate the Lisp, functional programming, and JVM features of Clojure. At every step they play on each other and tell a compelling software development story….”

I have been tinkering with Clojure on the side, at random spare moments, for more than two years, using a disorganized approach of looking at web postings, building and modifying simple projects that others have posted, and sometimes looking at Clojure how-to books as time permits.

From my perspective, Clojure in Action, 2nd Edition fills a beginner’s need for a friendly, well-organized approach to learning the language and putting it to work effectively. Developers already working with Clojure can benefit from having this book, too, as a handy reference. It covers a lot of ground, using reasonably short paragraphs and offers many short code examples to illustrate its key points.

Clojure in Action, 2nd Edition “assumes no prior experience with Lisp or with any functional programming language,” the authors emphasize. “It starts out with the absolute basics and slowly layers on the different features of the language in a way to make it all fit together in an intuitive way. It takes a first-principles approach to all the topics, first explaining why something needs to be done a certain way, and only then talking about the Clojure way.”

Clojure is not a language for absolute beginners. The authors assume “you’re familiar with an OO [object-oriented] language like Java, C++, Ruby, or Python, but no background in Java, Lisp, or Clojure is required.” They also assume you have downloaded Clojure and gotten it working on your PC. You can read more about Clojure and download it here.

This expanded 2nd edition states that it covers the “new” features of Clojure 1.6. Of course, Clojure already is up to 1.8, but I have tried many of the code examples at various points in the book and have not encountered problems while running 1.8.